It's time to dim the lights, close the curtains, open a bottle and listen to a song. Leonard Cohen has died and I want to be alone. Leonard Cohen was my secret, whispering companion through life. A father figure, a muse, a reminder that a man can be a lover and a romantic, and a failure, without being despicable.Like many of his fans, I'm significantly younger than my hero. When I first came across his opus - the early 1980s, my late teens - his best-known songs already wore the patina of years passed. Cohen was a veteran; his poetry and poise made other artists seem excitable, superficial, callow. Even those rock 'n' roll stars with poetical leanings - Lou Reed with his ballads, David Bowie's Dada-ish cut-ups, Nick Cave wallowing in his biblical gloom - were wannabes compared with Cohen.I was bewitched by the drum-like pluck of the guitar and the voice that crumbled and cracked and slipped off the stave. The carefully styled album covers provoked paradoxical thoughts: was this man - a Canadian Jewish poet who had lived on the island of Hydra and sang to hippies in Montreal coffee shops - a gent, a troubadour, a rebel, a lush?But the lyrics insisted on intimacy. When Cohen sang - or spoke - "Come over to the window" or "It's four in the morning" or "The rain falls down on last year's man", I thought he was talking to me, writing me a letter, inviting me outside to get drenched beside him.Cohen didn't merely permit sadness. He luxuriated in it. I remember how my mother, a depressive, protested whenever she heard the needle of our stereo unit drop in the groove and grind along to those opening words, spaced apart like six black crows, "Like a bird on a wire."He was bound to get on her nerves. He got on everyone's nerves. His words touched our scars and sorrows.Cohen was the very last Romantic poet, a writer who explored the niches and nuances of love, heartbreak, lust and betrayal. He dispensed wisdom (True love leaves no traces), dealt wryly with rejection ("She said, 'The art of longing's over and it's never coming back'") and turned the impossibility of true love into what it has to be if we are to survive: a fatal condition ("But let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie").I grew up with Leonard Cohen. His self-questioning Jewishness and his knowledge of scripture allowed me to think that my chosen degree - theology - might actually be cool.But Cohen could write and sing as if he might serve as a substitute for God in a godless world. On Avalanche (1971), his moodiest, most melodramatic song, the singer is a hunchbacked Prometheus, warning the hearer not to try to flatter with pain or devotion. Later on the albums I'm Your Man (1988) and The Future (1992), he looked over the US with pity and scorn, an apocalyptic creation."Things are going to slide, slide in all directions," he rasped, a Yeatsian Nostradamus for these times of political confusion. Few artists have taken the lyrics of pop, rock or folk as far down as Leonard Cohen.But he always came back to love. Cohen's life provided enduring archetypes of the romantic encounter: living simply as a young man on Hydra with his muse Marianne, scribbling poems between bouts of lovemaking and bottles of retsina; Suzanne, his platonic lover, bringing tea and oranges from China.The letter that Cohen wrote back in July to a dying Marianne merits one final citing:"Well Marianne, it's come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I've always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don't need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road."In his most recent interviews Cohen talked frankly about his own mortality. "I am ready to die," he told the New Yorker. "I hope it's not too uncomfortable."The words were troubling to us fans but not shocking. Cohen spent most of his 82 years dancing between desire and death. In 1977 he released an album titled Death of a Ladies' Man. It was a joke, of course - he was an inveterate seducer, a night owl, a man who rarely resisted what he called the "tyranny" of his need of women. But in acknowledging his failings, Leonard Cohen was a good way ahead of most men."We all have a sense of a truth," he told an interviewer in 2001. "The truth can be the most intimate conversation with one's heart about its desire and appetite. And when this conversation appears, it comes very close to the truth and a feeling of authenticity."No answers, then. No mercy. No easy ways out. Leonard Cohen's trick - his greatest gift - was to make you think the conversation was with you, with me, as well as with his own heart.RIP LC.Sincerely, C Moss ..